EZi Wallet & WiPay officially partners

In a ceremony held during the Chinese Tourism Trends and Mobile Payments Seminar (中国出境游与移动支付趋势论坛) that took place on 12 December 2017, EZi Wallet and WiPay signed an agreement that will see the two companies working together to enable merchants in Singapore to accept payments from the WeChat Pay app. The service is slated for launch in early 2018, and will enable EZi Wallet merchants to scale their potential customer base to include the large number of Chinese tourists who visit Singapore on a yearly basis.

Through the agreement, WeChat Pay users will be able to scan EZi Wallet’s QR code and pay for purchases through the WeChat Pay app, providing Chinese Tourists the same convenient payment experience that they are used to back home in China. As EZi Wallet is a member of the SGQR Taskforce, and is fully compliant with the SGQR standard, this will mean that WeChat Pay users will be able to scan and pay without worrying about differing QR code standards in Singapore. As long as EZi Wallet, or one of our partners, has an existing relationship with the merchant, WeChat Pay users will be able to scan and pay at these points.

This partnership ultimately enables local merchants to tap into the massive Chinese tourism market. According to the Singapore Tourism Board, there were 2.86M Chinese arrivals in 2016, who accounted for a total of S$3.5BN in spending. Allowing these tourists to make payments via their preferred payment method is an important key for Singapore merchants to unlock, and increase their share of this potential market.

Mr Ian Lee, Founder of EZi Wallet said, “The partnership with WiPay fits in with our vision of inclusiveness by bringing convenience to Chinese tourists visiting Singapore, and helping Singapore companies to thrive. WIPAY is focused on propagating payment acceptance points for outbound Chinese Tourists, whilst EZi Wallet has good insight to the challenges faced by local businesses in adopting QR payments.”

He sees this as a natural fit for both companies to work together in allowing local merchants to access the benefits of SGQR compliant mobile payments, and to tap into the Chinese tourism market by equipping them with the means to make it easy for tourists to spend. This is especially pertinent in times when retail takings are slowing down.

During the ceremony, an agreement was also signed between WiPay and Mei Tuan Dian Ping (美团点评), the company behind China’s two largest O2O platforms, Mei Tuan (美团) and Dian Ping (大众点评). Through WiPay, local merchants will be able to list their stores and promotions on the Mei Tuan Dian Ping app, exposing them to a combined total of over 600 million users. This highly popular app is a great platform for reaching out to the Chinese tourists even before they step foot in Singapore and has been proven to increase sales by as much as 30%, as shared by some local merchants during the seminar. To leverage on this partnership, EZi Wallet will be working with WiPay to offer listing and voucher promotions on Mei Tuan Dian Ping to EZi Wallet merchants in the coming days.

Through this partnership with WiPay, EZi Wallet has taken another step towards facilitating Singapore’s move towards a cashless society and Smart Nation. Stay tuned for more exciting news on how we are working hard to make this a reality in the near future. We have some exciting plans in store that we are finding difficult to keep under wraps! Hope to be able to share them with you soon!

For more details on this, vist https://www.channel8news.sg/news8/singapore/20171212-sg-wipay/3909364.html